The Best CRM Marketing Automation & Email Suppliers

We’ve researched, ranked, and rated the nine best CRM marketing automation and email suppliers for US businesses. Find yours today, and compare tailored quotes from top companies

Increasingly smart artificial intelligence (AI) is streamlining everything in sight, while ever smarter marketing tools are allowing businesses to reach constantly widening audiences of potential consumers.

That’s why you need the right CRM (customer relationship management) marketing automation tool for your business.

Say what?

Marketing automation is about, well… automating your team’s manual (but still important) marketing responsibilities. These include posting to social media, sending emails, and monitoring ad campaigns. Trust us – it’ll not only save your marketing experts valuable time, but help personalize the customer journey, too.

But to do it, you’ll need the right tool kit. So read on – we’ve researched, rated, and ranked the top CRM providers in the world, and reviewed them below for you.

The Best Marketing Automation Suppliers for US Businesses

According to our research, the best CRM marketing automation tool is HubSpot Marketing Hub.

Making up the rest of the top six are Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Freshworks CRM Marketing Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing, Zoho, and Sugar Market.

How did we decide, exactly? View our methodology below to find out, and learn more about the marketing automation metrics we used to rate the best marketing CRM software providers that follow.

On top of this, we’ve also rated our top three CRM software solutions for email marketing – monday.com, Sendinblue, and ActiveCampaign.

1. HubSpot Marketing Hub

With full marks for features and a superlative 93% customer approval rating, HubSpot is our top CRM pick for marketing teams. Also registering strong help and support scores, HubSpot is only let down by its price point, which reaches a hefty maximum of $3,200 per month (for ten users).

HubSpot Marketing Cloud: The Basics

HubSpot for Marketing Automation: Feature Analysis

Web forms? Yes.

Campaign design? Yes, on HubSpot’s ‘Pro’ plan and above.

Batch email marketing? Yes, although the number of emails you’re permitted to send per day will be determined by the email server you’re using. Handily, HubSpot alerts you when you’re near your daily limit, allowing you to reschedule any overspill to a day when there’s less on.

Email tracking? Indeed! This feature is available across all of HubSpot Marketing Hub’s plans.

Customer targeting? Yes.

HubSpot’s superb marketing automation capabilities also secure it a place on our list of the top 9 CRMs for marketing and creative agencies. Go check it out!

2. Salesforce Marketing Cloud (formerly ‘Marketing Cloud’)

Though registering strong ratings across the board for features, customer approval, and help and support, Salesforce suffers from a complicated, expensive pricing structure that may exclude marketing teams with more modest budgets.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement: The Basics

*Let’s talk pricing. There are many elements that make up the special case that is Salesforce’s marketing product. Each module is priced individually, so the total cost could, theoretically, be any combination of prices.

Basically, Salesforce is a system offering huge scope for your marketing team… but at an equally large price!

Salesforce for Marketing Automation: Feature Analysis

Web forms? Yes.

Campaign design? Yes – all of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s plans include a drag-and-drop email builder for marketing campaigns.

Batch email marketing? Yes. However, Salesforce limits you to 5,000 email sends per day, per account. It doesn’t exclude duplicate email addresses, either – so you’ll need to make sure your mailing lists are ‘clean’ before launching your next campaign, in order to avoid wasted sends.

Email tracking? You can activate tracking for emails across all of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s plans.

Customer targeting? Yes.

3. Freshworks CRM Marketing Cloud

Starting at an accessible $19 per month, Freshworks CRM Marketing Cloud (formerly Freshmarketer) also boasts some of the finest help and support of all the marketing automation tools we looked at. It sports the third-highest customer approval scores, too, though its more modest array of features prevents it from leading a real assault on the top two.

Freshworks CRM Marketing Cloud: The Basics

Freshworks CRM for Marketing Automation: Feature Analysis

Web forms? Yes.

Campaign design? A basic email builder is available with Freshworks CRM’s free version, though this grows to a more sophisticated drag-and-drop composer when you upgrade to the paid packages.

Batch email marketing? Yes. Though Gmail and Outlook cap your daily send totals at 300 emails, Freshworks CRM Marketing Cloud uses its own servers to deliver batches beyond those limits. How much you’re entitled to depends on the plan you select.

Email tracking? Available across all Marketing Cloud plans, though you’ll need Sales Cloud – Freshworks’ CRM module for sales teams – to benefit.

If you know you’ll be requiring both sales and marketing features, though, you can opt for Freshworks CRM’s ‘Customer-for-Life Cloud’. It combines the best of Freshworks CRM’s sales and marketing automation features with chat and telephony, bringing together everything your business needs into a single, convenient, affordable package.

Customer targeting? Freshworks CRM Marketing Cloud offers this functionality, though the level of granularity with which you can target specific customers depends on how much you’re willing to spend.

Basic segmentation is available with the ‘Growth’ plan, allowing you to segment your audience based on email activity, contact fields, lists, and journeys.

The more pricey ‘Pro’ plan, however, allows for more complex targeting. This feature leverages behavioral analysis, enabling you to target customers based on their movement throughout your site. It’s marketing automation, done well!

4. Dynamics 365 for Marketing

Dynamics 365 registers middle-of-the-road scores across all of our metrics – so it’s fitting that it’s also smack bang in the center of this list. Solid scores for features and help and support are matched by a good customer approval rating, though its fixed $1,500 price will be a bridge too far for many marketing departments.

Dynamics 365 for Marketing: The Basics

* Reduced to $750 if you already use another Microsoft Dynamics product, and have a minimum of 10 users

Dynamics 365 for Marketing Automation: Feature Analysis

Web forms? Yes – Dynamics 365 for Marketing also syncs with LinkedIn lead gen forms, allowing you to pull contact data straight into your CRM database, and easily measure the effectiveness of your LinkedIn campaigns.

Campaign design? Yes. Dynamics 365 enables you to build emails, campaigns, and landing pages with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder.

Batch email marketing? Yes. Your email send limits are set monthly, and are capped at ten times your quota of marketing contacts (or 1,000 sends per month, if you’re on a trial).

Email tracking? Yes. Dynamics 365’s ‘Customer Insights’ feature provides a detailed breakdown of your customers’ interactions with your emails, such as open rates and clicks.

Customer targeting? Yes, although you’re capped at 5,000 contacts per marketing segment.

5. Zoho

It’s a familiar story for Zoho. Though it boasts an excellent rating for price (starting at just $12 per user, per month, it’s the cheapest on our list), Zoho’s features are a tad more simplistic than most of the other CRM systems here. That said, it’s easy to set up, and is still one of the most user-friendly pieces of software we’ve come across.

Zoho: The Basics

Zoho for Marketing Automation: Feature Analysis

Web forms? Yes; the higher the pricing tier, the more forms you can create.

Campaign design? Available on all of Zoho’s paid plans. In addition to this, Zoho has a separate campaign builder product (Zoho Campaigns). Pricing for this starts from as low as $6 per month for up to 250 subscribers, when you select a pay-as-you-go plan.

Prices for monthly subscriptions – which include unlimited emails – are based on how many subscribers your business has. These plans start from $5 per month for up to 500 subscribers, and reach as high as $350 per month, for businesses with as many as 100,000 subscribers.

Batch email marketing? Available across all paid plans. Your daily send limit will depend on the plan you’ve selected:

• Standard: 250 sends per day
• Professional: 500 per day
• Enterprise: 1,000 per day

Zoho’s ‘Enterprise’ and ‘Unlimited’ editions also enable you to set up auto-replies to your batch emails.

Email tracking? Yes, on all plans.

Customer targeting? Yep!

Zoho’s price and user-friendliness make it one of the best CRM systems for small businesses.

And remember, you can try Zoho free for 15 days, or utilize its free version on an indefinite basis.

6. Sugar Market

Sugar Market offers a wealth of features, including analytics and marketing automation functionality that ranks among the industry’s best. It’d almost certainly be higher up our list, if not for an indifferent customer approval rating, lacklustre customer support, and opaque pricing.

Sugar Market: The Basics

Sugar Market for Marketing Automation: Feature Analysis

Web forms? Yes.

Campaign design? Yes.

Batch email marketing? Email sends are supported, although your daily send limits will be determined by your email server.

Email tracking? Yes, only you’ll have to use a separate email tracker module, which works like a plugin.

Customer targeting? Yes.

The Best CRMs for Email Marketing

Email marketing has never been particularly easy. Even the idea of it is almost crazy – sending unsolicited messages to people you don’t know, enticing them not only to open your email, but to read it, click it, and (hopefully!) end up making a purchase.

Nope, email marketing has never been easy at all. Unless, that is, you’re using the right CRM software.

Good marketing CRM software enables you to target customers with campaigns tailored to their tastes and habits. You can create forms to capture leads on your website and craft sequences of stunning emails, all from within the CRM’s interface. Then, you can send them in bulk to a custom audience, monitoring their performance to optimize future campaigns.

So, which marketing CRM is right for your business? Let’s find out.

Alternatively, hit one of the buttons below to start our free, quote-finding questionnaire – your quickest, most direct route to comparing tailored quotes from top email marketing CRM software providers.

Simply fill out the form with a few questions about your requirements, and our algorithm will match you with the email marketing CRM suppliers that are a good fit for your business.

All you have to do is keep an eye on your phone – hot, personalized marketing CRM quotes and advice are headed your way.

monday.com

Best bargain buy

monday.com also allows you to create clever, customizable forms, which you can share via a link, or embed into your website. When someone fills one out, the info will feed straight back into your monday.com dashboard – allowing you to pounce on the fresh lead, and react with quick, targeted marketing.

Plus, monday.com starts at just $9 per user, per month, making it a bonafide bargain.

The only real catch here is that monday.com integrates with popular email platforms such as Gmail and Outlook to enable batch email sends – it doesn’t actually offer this feature in-house. This means that any bulk email send limits will be determined by the email service provider you choose to connect monday.com to, and not by the email marketing tool itself.

While this is unlikely to be a problem for businesses with small-scale email marketing needs, it could be an issue if you’re planning some big campaigns!

monday.com Pricing

You can try monday.com free for 14 days. Head to monday.com’s website now to get started.

Sendinblue

Best for monitoring campaign success

You’ll also get an impressive array of marketing automation features for what you pay – or indeed, what you don’t pay.

Sendinblue’s free version comes with a drag-and-drop visual workflow editor, as well as a ‘page tracking’ feature. By monitoring the behavior of users as they navigate your site, it’ll allow you to engage them with tailored, impeccably timed content and communications.

Our verdict? It’s a no-brainer!

Sendinblue Pricing

Apart from a free version and an ‘Enterprise’ plan – which comes with a bespoke rate, depending on your business’s size and the extent of your email marketing needs – Sendinblue offers a couple of core pricing plans.

How much either ‘Lite’ or ‘Premium’ will cost you depends on the amount of emails you’ll be sending per month. Monthly costs break down as follows:

So, is Sendinblue’s free plan worth it? Unless your marketing team is solely a “me, myself, and I” kind of job, then the answer’s probably no. The free plan here imposes a restrictive cap of 300 emails per day on your marketing efforts, so it doesn’t exactly go hand in hand with scalability.

The free plan also blocks you off from Sendinblue’s more intriguing A/B testing and send time optimization analytics features. Basically, it’s suitable only for the stringiest of shoestring budgets.

Select the ‘Lite’ plan ($25 per month) instead – you won’t regret it.

For another CRM provider with killer email capabilities and a completely free plan, take a look at our Cloze review.

ActiveCampaign

Best for omni-channel marketing

All the email scheduling and autoresponder features you’d expect are included as standard. Plus, ActiveCampaign’s savvier automation capabilities will allow you to harness the power of email to turn leads into returning customers.

Oh, and you don’t even have to limit yourself to email marketing alone.

When we say ActiveCampaign is the best omni-channel marketing CRM, we mean it. You’ll be able to reach more customers with personalized experiences across SMS, social media, live chat, and your site’s landing pages…

ActiveCampaign Pricing

…and when it costs this little, why wouldn’t you?

Starting at just $9 per month, ActiveCampaign is one of the cheapest CRM systems on the market.

You can also try it free for 14 days.

How We Rated the Best Marketing Automation & CRM Tools

To rate each CRM supplier on their effectiveness for marketing teams specifically, we extended our explorations to include five key features that a good marketing automation or CRM tool simply has to do well.

This included honing in on functions for marketing teams only – we’ve looked at CRM for sales teams, as well as the best CRM for customer service automation, on separate pages.

In addition to the basics, then  – namely customer support, price, contact limit, and whether there’s a free trial – each marketing CRM software below is also ranked per its ability to perform each of the following crucial functions:

Web Forms

You can have the best-looking website in the world – but if it’s not turning your site’s visitors into prospective customers, it’s not reaching its full potential.

That’s where web forms come in. With the right marketing automation tool, you can create and embed a lead capture form into your website. By collecting the name, number, and other demographic details of your website’s users – and sending them straight to your CRM – web forms empower you to turn your website’s traffic into lucrative deals.

Campaign Design

Whether you’re designing a one-off email to capitalize on Black Friday or a drip campaign to build your brand, it’s crucial that your marketing looks good.

With a marketing automation tool, you can build communications that echo your business’s values and brand language, with powerful CTAs (calls to action) and an engaging design. And it’s easy – most marketing CRM software runs on simple drag-and-drop functionality.

You don’t need an eye for design, either – most marketing automation tools provide a range of preset, highly customizable templates to get you started.

Batch Email Marketing

CRM software is all about optimizing your marketing team’s processes – reaching more customers in less time, and doing it with the most effective messaging.

Batch email marketing is a good example of this at its finest – after designing your emails, you can send them en masse, to a specific list of prospective customers.

Email Tracking

Of course, it’s not just about sending emails out into the ether and forgetting about them. To grow your business, you need to know how effective your previous marketing campaigns have been; that is, how many people are opening, reading, and clicking your emails.

There’s a few ways in which you can do this, but using marketing CRM software is by far the most straightforward.

Plus, when you use a CRM system to track your sent emails, you can monitor exactly which parts of your messages are getting the most engagement from recipients. Which CTAs are most enticing?

Which images scream “CLICK ME!”?

Which subject lines do your customers struggle to resist?

Customer Targeting

At its most basic level, marketing CRM software acts as a contact database. As well as providing a safe place for your customers’ names, occupations, and contact details, a CRM system can store a whole range of important client info – which you can then use to create smarter, more tailored marketing campaigns, and produce more effective results.

With the right marketing automation tool, you can target customers by:

• Their buying preferences, including previous orders and total spend
• The nature of their previous visits to your website, or interaction with your brand
• Demographic information, such as age, gender, and more

Lapsed customers? Re-engage them with a deal or a discount that’s too good to turn down.

New customers? Let them know you care, by personalizing an email with their name in the subject line.

Marketing a product for women? Filter out your male subscribers to ensure you’re not wasting precious email sends on the wrong audience. Simple!

Next Steps

Which marketing CRM software provider is best for your business, then? 

Let’s recap.

Small teams are well-catered to by low-cost options such as Zoho and Freshworks CRM Marketing Cloud.

monday.com, though more of a project management tool by trade, will also satisfy the email send needs of most modest marketing departments. Likewise, ActiveCampaign and Sendinblue are solid, low-cost options for creating and managing bulk email campaigns.

Sugar Market, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Dynamics 365 for Marketing are all designed for medium-sized to large enterprises that have more complex marketing automation requirements.

And finally, of course, there’s HubSpot Marketing Hub, which we recommend for everyone.

As we mentioned earlier, email marketing isn’t easy – and neither is picking the right marketing automation software supplier. You have to balance the level of features your team requires, while keeping within the constraints of your budget, and ensuring you’re receiving the top-class help and support you deserve.

Basically, you’ll need to compare quotes from multiple CRM providers to get the best deal. And, thanks to our free quote-finding service, this part is easy.

Simply provide us with some details about your business, answering a handful of straightforward questions about your team, requirements, and the type of marketing CRM software you’re looking to implement.

You’ll then be contacted directly with tailored quotes from several of the industry’s leading marketing CRM providers. This will give you all the info you need to compare and contrast suppliers, at your fingertips.

It takes less than a minute, and is free for US-based businesses.